A novel bacterial foraging algorithm for automated tuning of PID controllers of UAVs

Up to now, PID controllers have been widely deployed in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and other automatical control systems, and have the benefit of simple tuning performed by trial and error. Their applications avoid some complicated modeling efforts however tuning these controllers do need experienced operators and may sometimes be time consuming. This paper presents a novel approach that could be used for the automatic tuning of a PID controller for a UAV. This approach relies on the bacteria foraging technique to guide the search for the optimal parameters of a PID controller in the parameters search space. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to improve the parameters chosen by the classical Ziegler Nicholas method. ©2010 IEEE.